14 DAY TRIAL // Last month we told you of an unannounced Acer Chromebook which will supposedly be powered by an NVIDIA Tegra K1.
The CB5 laptop was spotted on the website of a Swedish retailer, revealing the specifications of the upcoming laptop. However, a piece of information which wasn't made available to us then was how costly the Chromebook will be.
Now the guys over at the Italian website Eeevolution are reporting that the Acer Chromebook CB5 will be marketed for the price of €429 / $583. What’s more, the laptop is expected to start shipping out to customers in mid-July.
The machine takes advantage of a 13.3-inch display, and unlike any Chromebooks we have seen before, it runs on an ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor. The notebook also arrives with two USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet jack and headset jack.
Sadly, albeit knowing the screen size, we can’t tell you the exact definition the laptop will offer. We certainly hope it's going to be better than the average 1366 x 768 pixel resolution most Chromebooks arrive with. Acer could take cues from the Samsung latest Chrome OS laptops and deliver 1920 x 1200 res.
The laptop will also offer 4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. The quite high price-tag is not necessarily explained away by the presence of the NVIDIA Tegra K1 and Acer might have a hard time getting consumers to jump onboard with this product, because there are many laptops within this price range, that also offer the full functionality of Windows.
Surely, €429 / $583 might be just a starting ut price, which will immediately be slashed away by dealers. Bear in mind, we have no official confirmation that the product will end up selling for this particular sum of money, just yet.
For the time being we’re not particularly sure what the benefits ARM-based chips will bring to the table are. Chromebooks with the Intel Bay Trail or Haswell platform are capable of delivering long battery life and good performance, but will we be able to say the same of the Tegra K1?
Apart from the CB5 Chromebook, Acer has also made a Chrome OS laptop available for pre-order, which takes advantage of the Intel Core i3 Haswell platform.
There are other “odd” Chromebooks on the way, if we can call them out. For example, back at Computex, we also got to take a look at the first Chrome OS laptop running on a Rockchip processor. Supposedly, we’re going to see it in the wild around Q3 2014.